Today's Canberra Times editorial.... Just loving putting the boot into Alexander...Pity he's such an easy target, but then, so is the whole Howard Govt......LOL
A real man of marshmallow Friday, 30 July 2004
A LEXANDER DOWNER has been playing the buffoon on Iraq since anyone can remember. But now he is playing the knave as well. In the process he is not only doing damage to Australia and to common sense. He is putting in question a very important principle - about not negotiating with terrorists - which he claims to be defending. That principle will probably stand, in spite of Mr Downer's misrepresentations and distortions, but the casual observer might well wonder if it is such a good one if it needs such mendacious padding.
Spain, whatever Mr Downer says, is not an example of a country capitulating to terrorists. From Mr Downer's point of view, it might serve better as a warning of what happens to politicians who misrepresent what has happened in a terrorist attack. What happened in Spain was that the government of the day, arm firmly twisted by the United States, decided to join the coalition of the willing in Iraq. Its decision was deeply unpopular in the electorate. The opposition party declared itself strongly opposed to the commitment and said that, if it were elected at the coming polls, it would promptly withdraw Spanish forces from Iraq. All that had happened long before Madrid's train bombings. The opposition's policy had, of course, been roundly attacked by the Spanish prime minister of the day, and by statesmen such as George W.Bush and Tony Blair, in much the same way as similar people have been wheeled out to attack Mark Latham and Labor's policy in Australia.
The Government was generally thought to be marginally ahead in the campaign. Then the bombs struck - only two days out. The Government panicked and declared - against evidence immediately available to it - that it was certainly the work of Basque terrorists, not Islamist fanatics. Even as it became obvious that it was the work of a group under the umbrella of the al-Qaeda movement, it continued to lie and deny. At the poll, voters decisively rejected the Government.
Did terrorism help the opposition? Probably, though not because Spaniards were scared - they were infuriated by the deception of the Government. The new Government withdrew its troops from Iraq, as it had said it would. The removal of its flag from the coalition flagpoles has caused America political damage - and in that sense given aid and comfort to America's enemies. But it has been of no military significance whatever.
The Philippines Government's contribution to Iraq was entirely token. It had been scheduled for withdrawal only weeks away when Iraqi hostage-takers captured a Filipino truck driver and said he would be beheaded unless the token force was withdrawn immediately. President Gloria Arroyo had a very difficult choice. It was the harder not only because of the unpopularity of her country's involvement in Iraq, which had been secured not by a sense of common cause or by persuasion but by blandishments it could not resist. The fate of outworkers is a major domestic issue in her poor country. Mrs Arroyo bringing forward the troop withdrawal was a mistake, and open to criticism, including by Mr Downer. But it did not warrant the abuse he has hurled upon this neighbour, one which has its own serious terrorism problems, its own complicated and seemingly intractable difficulties with Muslim separatists and whose help and cooperation Australia needs if the scourge of terrorism is to be wiped out in our region.
Mr Downer was not alienating a friend and neighbour for some high principle or international purpose but so as to make cheap, and false, political propaganda against the Labor Party in Australia. Labor, of course, can look after itself. It is Filipinos, and Spaniards, who are entitled to feel used and abused for bad purposes. Mr Downer faints with faux shock and indignation whenever any critic of his policies makes any criticism of the US or its politicians in the course of putting an argument to the Australian people - lest it damage that relationship. But he has never hesitated to embarrass this country by abusing the leaders and people of nations in less a position to answer back.
Even more objectionable, however, is the misrepresentation to the Australian people which suggests that an upsurge in popular resistance to the American-imposed administration in Iraq is itself a response to the supposed success of the terrorism in Spain or on the Philippines. Iraq is not in revolt because its people want a return of Saddam Hussein, or the people-shredders and weapons of mass destruction Mr Downer was once telling us he had. Nor is the revolt the work of sinister outsiders who have sneaked in, perhaps in Filipino-driven trucks. It is in revolt because Iraqis want to govern themselves, not be governed by people foisted upon them by invaders whose pretence of liberation has evaporated. If only Alexander Downer understood that, perhaps Australians would not themselves be complicit in the whole Iraqi mess. And the popularity that the causes of the terrorists are acquiring in most of the rest of the word might not seem partly our fault.
